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SoundCloud still isn’t conforming our story that they recently raised a $50 million round led by Kleiner Perkins – but today at the DLD conference in Munich they have announced a pretty significant milestone – hitting 10 million users. SoundCloud is gunning to be a kind of YouTube for sound, but with a wide variety of apps that can plug into its platform, and a business model which encourages upgrades to a premium paid experience. It competes with the like of Audioboo to some extent, but that is on a much lower 300,000 users and focuses on speech.

That’s a slightly sedate increase of three million users over the seven million SoundCloud announced back in in January 2011, however, it’s now on track to put on a million new members in January.

However, its moving into interesting new territory today, unveiling a new feature it calls Story Wheel.

This SoundCloud Labs project allows anyone to record their own narrative around a series of images to tell a personal story. To illustrate how it works, the co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss have demonstrated with a conversation about their journey to date, which is reminiscent of an old fashioned slide show. Very ‘Kodak moment’.

If you’re unaware of Soundcloud, here’s the skinny. It was launched in October 2008, has had over five million official SoundCloud iphone/android apps downloaded and over 10,000 third party apps have been developed on SoundCloud’s open platform (recent additions include integrations with professional music creation software Pro Tools and Cakewalk).

Google just sealed an acquisition deal with Katango, a company that builds algorithms for automatically sorting friends. The Kleiner Perkins-backed company was founded in 2010. The Katango team will be incorporated into the Google+ team.

Katango’s previous product was an iPhone app that sorted Facebook friends into lists automatically. Google could use the same algorithms to make the work of maintaining Google+ circles easier.

Ever since we broke the news about Google’s circles, it seemed like a necessary new social networking feature. The ability to selectively share with the right groups of people is an important part of being oneself on the Web. But the effort required to maintain G+ circles is discouraging. Facebook’s smart lists solve the problem remarkably well. Hopefully, the Katango team will help Google help us keep our online social lives organized.

Do you spend a lot of time organizing your friend lists on social networks?

In an episode that aired a few weeks ago, One Kings Lane was co-hosting a party with one of the decorators, Nathan Turner, to celebrate a new curated sale from Turner featuring hand-picked furniture and accessories from India. The site actually got a ton of air time, and even featured co-founder Susan Feldman (pictured in the post with Turner). The Turner-curated sale on One Kings Lane (which featured the Bravo endorsement) started the following morning after the episode aired and One Kings Lane saw most items sold out within minutes.

This past week’s episode again featured One Kings Lane as part of the story line, with celebrity designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard accompanying Feldman and another One Kings Lane employee to London to pick out items for a similar curated sale. One Kings Lane got much more air time in this past episode, and when the sale hit the next morning, the event was 96 percent sold out 3 hours into the start of the Bullard-London sale. And Wednesday was all time high for daily new member acquisitions, thanks to the feature on the show.

A Bravo endorsement is a big deal for the flash sales site, considering the channel is seeing record viewership among adults ages 18 to 49. Feldman tells us that the site was originally doing a Tastemaker Tag sale with Turner last year, and One Kings Lane actually took a TV crew with them to film the journey in the effort of pitching Bravo with the idea to use the flash sales site in the reality TV show. Upon return, Feldman says Bravo ended promoting the startup in the show because of the strategic fit.

Nowadays, broadcast is traditionally not thought of as a “direct action” marketing channel for web startups. But this example with One Kings Lane and Bravo (who has also featured partnerships with Foursquare and Shazam) demonstrates the power of connecting broadcast to next generation commerce, such as the flash sales model.

One Kings Lane has proven that a niche commerce model can not only draw a large userbase (the company is nearing 2 million users, says Feldman), but see revenue growth as well. The startup grew revenue over 500 percent from 2009 to 2010. In this Wall Street Journal interview, One Kings Lane CEO Doug Mack says that he expects to continue this growth (by “hundreds of percent”) this year as well. And more than 75 percent of sales come from repeat customers (I happen to fall into this category).

The truth of the matter is that commerce is evolving and promotional deals with networks, technology companies and other content providers is just one way in which flash sales sites are innovating. Gilt has been combining editorial with commerce in its foodie site Gilt Taste as well as in its Home And Furniture vertical. And Gilt just launched an interesting deal with in-flight WiFi company Gogo Wireless to offer exclusive in-air deals and free access on the flash sales site.

Celebrity partnerships are another way that flash sales sites are trying to draw business and engage with users. One Kings Lane featured a deal with actress Gwyneth Paltrow to promote her new cookbook and held and event in New York in her honor as well. Gilt and Lady Gaga teamed up for a curates dale featuring Gaga-inspired merchandise, access to Gaga events and more.

Feldman explains that not every celebrity or broadcast partnership is the right one. It’s important to make sure the brands fit, she explains, “where there is good synergy, there’s a win-win for everyone.”

Editors Note: Guest contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on Twitter @semilshah.

Reports are swirling that Twitter is in talks to raise $400 million, valuing the company close to $8 billion. It seems as if it was only yesterday that Twitter raised $200m from Kleiner Perkins. At the time of Kleiner’s investment, some pundits chuckled beneath their breath, claiming the old venture firm was paying up on price in order to claim a bit of equity in social networks, which they had been perceived to have missed.

Despite that laughter, it may be John Doerr, his partners, other Twitter investors, and their employees that share in the last laugh. In addition to the success of their niche funds, Doerr knew exactly the bet he was making when he hunted down this deal last December. In buying a piece of Twitter, one could connect the dots for the possibility that Doerr, with his deep knowledge of Google, knows something about a Twitter endgame that got his investment juices flowing. There have been countless blog posts trying to show that Google should buy Twitter. At the same time, other technology giants left hanging without any social data could perceive Twitter as an attractive acquisition target also, giving them a large network and helping circumnavigate many walled-garden sites filled with social, user-generated content. Can the company’s major shareholders help create competition for a Twitter deal in a very small market?

The roll call of Twitter’s investors is impressive, littered with the names of blue chip venture firms and consumer web celebrities, many of whom built their reputations largely through this one investment—and rightly so. With around 400 employees, half of whom are focused on engineering and product, Twitter doesn’t necessarily need almost half a billion dollars of additional financing to keep going. To date, it has been able to book some revenue based largely on the promoted tweet ad unit.

However, it has also been acquiring companies to help eliminate blind spots in its technology and product offering, to date spending more than $50M on purchases like Fluther, TweetDeck, and most recently, BackType. One could make the case that as the company continues to get the product back on track that a mix of housekeeping plus new acquisitions make sense to get the product to a point of stability. This seems to be what is happening especially under the product guidance of c0-founder Jack Dorsey, who came back but still is CEO of Square, and former Google AdSense guru Satya Patel.

That is, because right now, the Twitter product struggles just to be stable. For those that use Twitter’s native web site in the browser, it’s been considerably slower, possibly because the system is processing over 200m tweets per day. Sure, that’s a lot, but in those 200m items are a lot of loud, spammy, and inaudible (or inauthentic) accounts. For those trying to get a handle on direct messages (“DMs”), random old threads keep popping up when they finally load, which means they may be moving all DMs to a new server. @Replies are still not distinguishable from @Mentions, users haven’t been educated to make lists, and it’s very hard to search through favorites or old tweets. There are also more add-on options available per tweet via mobile than there is on the web, perhaps due to the fact that for those that use Twitter heavily, there are so many different clients from which to access the stream.

And therein lies the huge challenge but also Twitter’s massive opportunity. There has been much controversy about Twitter’s handling of its own developer community. For some, the lack of a clear roadmap has spooked people from investing in the space with time, money, and developer resources. For others, talk is cheap, and the reality that Twitter will have to eventually own every piece of the stack is obvious, so those that enter the fray must do so willingly.

Most recently, these tensions were brought to light when Twitter was seen to attack Uber Media and then subsequently acquired TweetDeck, or when Twitter decided to launch it’s own photo-sharing service in partnership with PhotoBucket (and thereby bypassing services like Twitpic and yfrog), or when it decided to get into the URL-shortening game, going so far as to re-shorten URLs that were already shortened by other services like bit.ly. As powerful and disruptive as Twitter can be in the real world, make no mistake that in its own ecosystem, similar forces are at work.

There has now been a good year of “bubble” saber-rattling in the technology world, and combined with today’s red-hot IPO market, Twitter needs to keep advancing its chess pieces forward. While the public demand for shares in Twitter may be huge, the reality is that the five-year old company not only doesn’t have the revenue acceleration needed to make this a viable option, but it’s product isn’t entirely set either. This latest $400m fundraising round may be an attempt to help fuel more product-enhancing acquisitions and, overall, to begin a consolidation of fragmented clients and services that currently survive solely on an oxygen supply from Twitter’s API. With each round raised and as its valuation goes up and up, the possible exit outcomes dwindle and the stakes get higher. The Twitter endgame transforms from chess into a dangerous game of roulette.

From my own personal viewpoint as a Twitter user, my sincere hope is that Twitter remains an independent, standalone company that eventually is publicly-traded. I will line up to buy shares. I view the Web through Twitter and spend more time on the service than any other, by a mile. And while I hope it will IPO, I have this sinking feeling that’s not realistic. This is not to suggest that Twitter is failing at finding and tuning all the best possible business models. They are doing an incredible job with only 400 people. It’s astonishing, really. Rather, it’s that the scope of all the potential opportunities is so massive, wide, and deep—from Internet, to television, to back-end analytics, search, location—that it may take a real partnership to transform these models into real revenue engines.

Who would be interested in Twitter should they continue to remain private and closely-held? Some make the case for companies like Apple, especially after its integration of Twitter into its iOS5 software. A company like Twitter could give cash-rich Apple a huge network to deploy its iAd advertisements on multiple devices, perhaps eventually even on television. Earlier this year, there was some chatter that Facebook may be interested, but they don’t (yet) have enough cash on hand to do this (though Facebook stock could do the trick). There’s always Microsoft, which certainly has cash on hand and an appetite to buy social communication services, recently demonstrated by its $8 billion acquisition of Skype.

This leaves one company, located in Mountain View, that many believe could be the perfect acquirer for Twitter, despite the fact it just launched its own social network, Google+, which is poised to launch brand pages, too. A possible Google-Twitter acquisition has been analyzed to death, so I won’t do that here, other than to say on paper, it makes a ton of sense. Because of all the bountiful seeds Twitter has planted around the world, the company best positioned to harvest those seeds (and turn a healthy buck while doing so) is Google, bar none.

But, as Twitter raises more money at higher valuations, and if an IPO is not likely in the near future, the number of possible outcomes dwindles. While an acquisition by one of the four companies listed above could be huge, both in terms of dollars and media attention, the real game would be to create enough competition among at least two of the four possible bidders to drive up the price and maximize shareholder returns. If Twitter uses the new funding to continue to fortify the product and also continue on a hunt for the best business models, it may give the potential acquirers information that leads them to think they may not be likely to extract profits from Twitter either.

By raising a whopping round, Twitter buys itself time but also elevates the stakes. Does Twitter putter along for the next few years and stumble upon a business model, enabling it to IPO? Does a giant like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google snatch up the company, or better yet, engage in a chess match with each other for the right to buy it for close to $10b or more, minting money for the company shareholders? Or, does Twitter start to slowly fade away, unable to reel in enough cash to keep the twittering machine humming? With the first option being a longshot, we’re down to two numbers on the roulette wheel. My money and my hope is on black: an acquisition.

At the end of this month, we are putting on a Mobile First CrunchUp, which will focus on the increasingly popular strategy of creating a mobile product first, and a regular Web product second, if ever. Mobile is just a more interesting part of the Web right now for many reasons—iPhone/Android, tablets, location-aware apps, cell phone cameras, GPS.

People are so interested in this topic that tickets sold out before I even announced any speakers. Well, if you bought a ticket, you won’t be sorry because the speakers are awesome. Joe Hewitt, the former Facebook engineer who created its iPhone app—one of the most downloaded of all time—and then left Facebook to pursue a more native HTML5 approach to creating mobile apps, will talk about native versus mobile Web apps. Omar Hamoui, the founder of Admob, which he sold to Google for $750 million, is now doing Churn Labs, which churns our one mobile project after another. He was doing mobile first before it was cool. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom built the most popular photo-sharing app with hardly a Web presence at all. Other speakers will include Soundtracking’s Steve Jang, Tango’s Eric Setton, Foursquare’s Tristan Walker, Kleiner Perkins’ Chi-Hua Chien, and August Capital’s Howard Hartenbaum.

If you didn’t get a ticket, don’t worry. We’ll be livestreaming the event right here on July 29. The Mobile First Crunchup will precede our annual summer party at August Capital. There are still tickets for just the party, and we are releasing another batch of 100 tickets right now.

Below is the line-up of confirmed speakers so far (we’ll be adding a few more). And if you have a great mobile product that you want to launch for the first time at the event, contact me.

Sponsorships:
The combined CrunchUp – Summer Party also gives us a great sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzoor Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Although many investors are spinning for the chance to invest in Turntable.fm, the hot music startup has not yet picked a DJ, despite reports to the contrary. Business Insider claims that Turntable has raised $7.5 million at a $37.5 million valuation and “that term sheets were indeed signed yesterday.” But reached a few hours ago as he was boarding a plane, co-founder and chairman Seth Goldstein told me, “We have not closed any new financing.”

There is certainly a lot of interest in Turntable from VCs who want to fund its next round. The buzz among venture investors is that there is intense competition for the deal, particularly between Union Square’s Fred Wilson, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins. Wilson is the clear favorite (Turntable is based in New York City), but he is being outbid by Accel and Kleiner.

The rumor is that Wilson is offered Turntable a $25 million pre-money valuation, while Accel and Kleiner offered double. That could have easily been pushed up to $30 million pre-money, in which case the $37.5 million figure would pencil out as a post-money valuation. (Just remember, VCs send signed term sheets all the time. It doesn’t mean the company has to accept the terms).

Not only are top-tier VCs excited about Turntable, there’s even some potential acquirers sniffing around, including AOL, Facebook, and Sony. As far as I can tell, no formal offers were ever made because co-founders Goldstein and Billy Chasen just got this started and don’t want to sell. Plus, they obviously aren’t having any problems raising money.

Why is everyone going gaga over a startup that launched with a completely different product, Stickybits, that never went anywhere? Turntable is a social music site where you enter different listening rooms in which players can become DJs and spin music while chatting with each other’s avatars. Chris Sacca likes to hang out there a lot (he is a previous investor, along with First Round and Polaris). It’s been gaining some impressive early traction, even though you still need to know someone to get in.

It is social music discovery at its best. You can listen to hours of full-length songs selected by other players in a variety of different themed music rooms. The better the DJ, the more points everyone else rewards him with. And if you like a song you can add it to your playlist, or buy it through Amazon or iTunes.

But the business is not a slam dunk. Turntable pays per-stream fees just like Pandora or other “Internet radio” services. The music labels could decide to crack down on Turntable and try to extract higher fees. But Turntable’s early growth and engagement numbers are too high to ignore. People spend hours in these rooms. Maybe this time, the labels won’t kill it before trying to work out a deal. Even then, though, Turntable will have to find other ways to make money—perhaps through digital goods or better avatars, sponsored rooms, or some people might be willing to pay to be a featured DJ.

Twitter is once again raising money, this time at a $7 billion valuation, according to Spencer Ante of the Wall Street Journal. That valuation would be almost double the $3.7 billion valuation Twitter got last December when it raised $200 million from Kleiner Perkins and other private investors.

But that valuation would put it below the $8 billion to $10 billion takeover talks rumored last February, which Twitter denied. Those takeover rumors were also reported by Spencer Ante.

Twitter certainly could raise more money. Many investors would like to own shares, despite the fact that it hasn’t yet found a revenue model to match its technological and cultural impact. Perhaps DST, which was muscled out of the last round by Kleiner, would be interested to take another look.

Despite all the IPO activity among Web companies these days, Twitter is not believed to be preparing for an IPO anytime soon. It simply doesn’t have the financials to make that kind of run for the public markets. But with 200 million tweets per day and growing, there’s got to be a business in there somewhere. Right?

It’s official. Jack Dorsey’s Square has joined the billion dollar valuation club. The mobile payments startup closed a $100 million series C led by Kleiner Perkins, a story we broke a few weeks ago. The new round values Square above $1 billion.

Tiger Management is also an investor. And Mary Meeker, the former Morgan Stanley Internet analyst who is now a partner at Kleiner, will get a board seat. She will join other new board members Vinod Khosla and Larry Summers.

Up until now, ecommerce valuations have been relatively reasonable compared to social media valuations. As Aileen Lee of Kleiner Perkins and Kevin Ryan of Gilt Group discussed on stage at Disrupt, there’s resistance for these companies’ prices to get too out of control because frequently the margins are tight and scaling up takes time and investment.

Also, ecommerce companies have a pretty clear business model. That sounds like it should be a good thing for whetting investor attention, but the unfortunate truth is nothing ruins a wildly speculative valuation like real revenue numbers. Real revenue numbers usually get multiples off existing revenues, not multiples off the promise of what they could be.

Someone should tell all that to BeachMint, because its new funding round seems to break all of those preconceived notions. The company has confirmed exclusively to TechCrunch that it has raised $23.5 million, just six months after its last $10 million venture round. The company wouldn’t comment on the valuation, but according to our sources it was at a rich $150 million pre-money valuation.

This brings BeachMint’s total invested to date to $38.5 million. This round was lead by Scale Venture Partners with Chicago-based LightBank coming in as a new investor as well. Also participating in this round were all the existing investors including Valley firms Trinity Ventures and NEA. Scale general partner Sharon Wienbar had been tracking the company for a while and was impressed by the combo of a strong curation model, an experienced team mixed together with “a little of that Southern California celebrity magic.”

BeachMint, started by MySpace cofounder Josh Berman and Diego Berdakin, primarily operates a site called JewelMint, which is almost the exact same model as ShoeDazzle. People join a monthly club, fill out a fun survey to asses their personal style, and they’re shown a selection of jewelry each month they might like for about $30 each.

Unlike the old CD clubs of my childhood, there’s no obligation to buy something every month. Like ShoeDazzle is cofounded by Kim Kardashian, JewelMint has some celebrity backing too, from Kate Bosworth and her stylist Cher Coulter. (In case it’s not clear, they did not design the jewelry used to illustrate this post.) Its second site, StyleMint is opening in June and will feature T-shirts designed by the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen for $29.99 per month. The plan is to expand to multiple verticals, not just in women’s apparel. Things like food, wine, beauty products are all on the table. “We have 100 ‘Mints’ we’ve thought of,” Berman says.

The company seems to be doing well roughly nine months after the launch of JewelMint, but the rich valuation caught several Valley VCs by surprise. ShoeDazzle also recently raised a round of venture money at impressive terms: Andreessen Horowitz invested $40 million at a valuation we originally reported to be north of $200 million. We’ve since learned the post-money price was $280 million. Also not bad.

But a source with knowledge of both companies tell us there is one big difference between the two companies: Their revenues. ShoeDazzle is doing roughly $5 million in monthly revenues, while JewelMint is doing just $500,000 a month– literally ten times less. What made Andreessen Horowitz so hot and bothered to get in ShoeDazzle was the model in part, but it was also the revenues, the growth, and the company’s rabidly engaged Facebook fan page, which has more than 1 million users. JewelMint’s fan page attendance is about half that; then again it’s a younger brand. It also didn’t hurt that ShoeDazzle founder Brian Lee’s other company LegalZoom just raised a round from Kleiner Perkins and is expected to go public this year.

Either Shoedazzle’s investors got a steal, Berman is an ace negotiator, or investors really believe the vertical strategy is going to catch hold in a big way. BeachMint wouldn’t comment on revenues or the valuation, but said they had multiple bids at that price. “We talked to very quantitatively driven investment firms, and they got very excited when they say the numbers,” Berman says.

A couple VCs we spoke with say they passed on the BeachMint deal because of concerns over whether this model works broadly across all a myriad of verticals. After all, sprawling shoe collections have made Imelda Marcos and Carrie Bradshaw aspirational figures for many women– it’s hard to think of many cult figures with obscene collections of $30 earrings. And other verticals may make less sense. How many categories are there where you want to pay $40 to have a new item every month? How many sunglasses, hair accessories, bath products or handbags does one woman need? When it comes to clothes, H&M and Zara are formidable low-cost, real-world incumbents.

Indeed, ShoeDazzle and JewelMint’s success is theoretically at odds with the philosophy behind another hot ecommerce company, Rent the Runway, which tries to solve the problem of a having a closet-full-of-nothing-to-wear by allowing women to rent a couture piece for the price they’d spend on something new at H&M.

Weinbar and BeachMint’s founders agree that jewelry is a far less intuitive category, and say the fact that JewelMint is going so well is evidence that there are others out there that might surprise us all. The risk is overload, particularly now that two companies have scored rounds at such impressive valuations. No doubt even more copy cats are on the way. Getting into the too-siloed “It’s a Facebook for people who like fish!” territory rarely ends well.